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Some of America's most powerful figures from government, industry and academia met Wednesday in Pittsburgh to chart a course for cooperation to help combat terrorism.

Corporate leaders included C. Michael Armstrong, chairman of AT&T Corp.; Raymond V. Gilmartin, chairman of Merck & Co. Inc.; F. Duane Ackerman, chairman of BellSouth Corp.; William D. Smith, president of Kemper Insurance Companies; Irwin Jacobs, chairman of Qualcomm Inc.; John P. Morgridge, chairman of Cisco Systems; and Michael Wickham, chairman of Roadway Corp.

From academia, attendees included the leaders of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

And from government, there were U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, Gov. John Engler of Michigan and R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

AT&T's Armstrong said the most imminent terrorist threat to America, its corporations and institutions is from attacks on information technology and communications infrastructure.

"We've got to look at cyber-security with the same seriousness we look at the rest of our organization," Armstrong told a group of corporate and government leaders at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown, which hosted the Symposium on Security and Productivity sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness and Carnegie Mellon University.

A Council on Competitiveness survey of 230 executives of companies with more than $50 million in revenue found that more than half are not spending more on security today than they did a year ago, and more than two thirds said they didn't see how enhanced security could make them more competitive.

Even so, the corporate chieftains, university presidents and government leaders labeled security not as an end in itself, but as a means to increase economic productivity and efficiency.

Such enhancements could come from technology that, for example, uses mathematical algorithms to process information into meaningful clusters that would enable the FBI to detect potential threats to the nation. Such technology also could be used by corporations or researchers to mine data for information to improve business processes, or accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

Vivisimo Inc., a Pittsburgh document clustering software company founded three years ago by CMU graduates, was one of several local and national companies, universities and research labs demonstrating technologies for combatting terrorism.

"It was amazing that for 10 minutes I was talking to the governor of Michigan about our software before knowing who he was," said Denny Brestensky, vice president of Vivisimo.

One technology displayed was a new software program from the CMU Robotics Institute designed to trip up cyber-terrorists who attempt to shut down computer networks through so-called "denial-of-service" attacks by changing Internet addresses on the fly when an attack is detected.

"We move the victim out of harms way," said Joseph Giampapa of the Robotics Institute. "It's a cat-and-mouse game."

Kemper Insurance President Smith said insurance executives are preparing for the next terrorist attacks on the assumption they with be chemical in nature. He said that unless government provides adequate "backstop" insurance against catastrophic events, his industry might not recover from another large-scale attack.

Legislation proposed in Congress is insufficient to deal with the problem, he said, particularly a House bill that would authorize emergency loans to insurers.

Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, said better training and higher wages for security personnel in America's skyscrapers are necessary to prevent terrorism.

"American property managers are too addicted to the low-bid system," he said.

Commerce Secretary Evans said the federal government is committing record amounts to research and is proposing making permanent the current research and development tax credit.

"Our top job is to create the right environment for innovation," Evans said.

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